59 pages • 1 hour read
Nancy Scheper-HughesDeath Without Weeping
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Casa and Rua
The terms casa and rua speak to an internal division in the life of every resident on the Alto, an internal division engendered by the reality of class divides. The author argues that the dynamics of class governs relations among the residents of the Alto in distinct and rigid ways, depending on if one is in public(rua), or in their home (casa).
On the surface, the division between casa and rua is a division between the individual as defined by their socioeconomic role within the implicit caste system of the Alto. For example, those of the pobres generally bear a certain level of dependency and inferiority towards the planting and professional classes, evident in terms of address and familiarity. How they regard one another, and what it is acceptable to ask and expect from one another, will be affected by these roles. Moreover, a certain amount of intimacy is precluded, simply due to the distinction of classes. By this token, members of different classes will appear differently to one another; beyond this, however, members of the same class may only expect a certain aspect of one individual in public, or from their rua identity.
Repression―official and unofficial―is an unavoidable component of the idea of rua, and its negation through casa. Mistrust, suspicion, and paranoia are integral to rua, sentiments made real by the ever-present fact of surveillance and community informants. The eminent class divisions of Northeastern Brazilian accentuate this ambient mistrust; for the rural poor in particular, their reticence to political expression is fed by their vulnerability, and the frequent use of political violence to stop their attempts to organize. This threat of political violence―whether implicit or not―has a definite chilling effect on public discourse, down to casual conversation.
Next to this, the casa would seem to be a more authentic, more individualistic representation of the person, matching their personal beliefs, motivations, habits, and moods. Ostensibly, these would be more freely expressed and understood in the more organic space of the casa. However, this is not the case. Although the casa engenders a person in a manner distinct from that engendered in the rua, that personage does not represent the "true individual," but instead a different series of codes, conventions, customs, and habits. Although these may clash with the conventions enforced by the greater economic powers of the rua, they do not innately predicate a liberal, individualistic, sense of the self.
Moreover, while the self that is engendered in the casa may seem more "authentic" or "organic" (with respect to its adherence to traditional norms and values), codes and conventions still predicate one's behavior, though in different ways. The relationship of casa and rua is a critical aspect within Death Without Weeping; without the author's attention to this dialectic, it is difficult to understand the elemental conflicts at the heart of the culture of the modern Brazilian Northeast.
"Mother Love"
Death Without Weeping 's many stories of mothers of the Alto, especially those of Lordes, Antoinetta, and Biu, offer a theoretical elaboration and defense of the "mother love" practiced in the Alto. This defense is set up against the implicit argument that the fatalistic resignation of these women towards child death simply means these women do not truly "love" their children. Whether through the continual trauma of socioeconomic marginalization, or the persistence of cultural and religious views that devalue human life, this implicit argument casts judgment upon women of the Alto, individually and collectively. The author contends directly with this view, seeking both to critique its normative simplifications and rebut its claims.
The social conditions of the Brazilian Northeast present considerable obstacles to the practice of the ideal of "mother love," factors of which these women are well aware, and struggle against, with varying degrees of success. These factors are both material―chronic malnutrition, infectious disease, economic hardship, and anxiety—as well as cultural and political, such as the decline of the practice of breast-feeding, the threat of political violence, and the sacralization of child death in popular religion.
Together, these factors divert and frustrate women's preferences. What ensues is a convoluted pragmatics, characterized by hard choices and compromise that are in turn reinterpreted and reincorporated into the culture of the Alto. This argument is enhanced by the author's claim that such pragmatics characterize "mother love" in every context. In the Alto, however, the forces that predicate these hard choices are much clearer, aggressive, and relentless. The extent to which mothers may enact their "love" is always influenced by the resources available to them, as well as the expectation and obligation placed on and felt by these mothers. In essence, the author's underlying contention is that "mother love" is and always will be a pragmatic exercise, rather than an ideal one. The principal illustration of this argument are the staggering child and infant-mortality rates for the Alto, and how this affects real choices for mothers.
Throughout Death Without Weeping, the author contends that the high incidence of child death dramatically changes how “mother love” is both practiced and understood by the women of the Alto. Specifically, the author seeks to defend Alto women's apparent lack of "attachment" to young children and infants, and the frequent incidence of women appearing to "give up" or simply ignore children deemed unlikely to survive.
To situate this argument, the author cites the disparity between modern and pre-modern ideals of motherhood, focusing on how expectation of child mortality changed how children were treated and understood in private and public life. The author argues that in all these pre-modern contexts, the relative powerlessness of preventing infant death, coupled with the relative deprivation of modern social and medical systems, often engendered situations that forced mothers to make brutal choices, and appear to "play favorites"―situations that offend the sensibilities furnished by modern social engineering.
Child death becomes an unavoidable part of motherhood, which the culture learns to respond to in three ways: delaying attachment, minimizing grieving, and sacralizing the child as an "angel."As Biu, Lordes, and Antoinetta explain, this is a pragmatics based on a simple concept: the needs of the living outweigh those of the dead. While child deaths are bitterly mourned on the Alto, the expectation dictates that these individual tragedies cannot and must not detract from the needs of the present―i.e., mothering those children who are living. Thus, the judgment of an apparent lack of "mother love" on the behalf of the women of the Alto obfuscates a deeper, more grim reality: the exploitative social divisions and dysfunctional social fabric of this society, which has created a situation that has oftentimes made motherhood a desperate, futile affair.
Violence and Death
In the Brazilian Northeast, violence is both implicit and explicit, overt and subtle. The author argues that class conflict is not only a form of violence, but the implicit form of violence, which predicates and engenders secondary and tertiary forms of violence. The author argues that the past and present arrangement of the social and economic system of the Northeast rests upon violence, and the hard labor and deprivation grind away the poorer classes’ ability to resist.
The center of this idea is sugarcane production, and the history thereof. The author argues that the dominance of the modern-day system of industrial-agricultural sugarcane production over the Northeast, although free of the explicitly-violent structures of slavery, locks the poorer residents of the Northeast into a harmful, exploitative socioeconomic arrangement.
The injustice of this arrangement is a form of trauma perpetrated by the upper classes, and maintained by both the threat of state violence and the continual desolation of the rural population from infectious disease, chronic malnutrition, and chronic overwork. The author's argument rests on the interpretation of the trauma and misfortune of daily life on the Alto as a form of violence, inherent to class conflict. However, the exploitative effect of sugarcane production is only part of this thesis. The author argues that political repression is endemic to the Brazilian Northeast, practiced in such a way that the poorer classes are constantly afraid to voice their anger, much less organize into a single body.
This passive suppression then becomes the status quo; the people can no longer vent their frustrations, much less organize any kind of resistance. In this context, violence begets violence: this implicit violence of class conflict affects how individuals and families relate to one another, and abuse and neglect are the secondary effects of this primary violence of passive suppression. The author argues that this violence ultimately feeds into early and/or accidental death.
The lack of clean water, for instance, represents one axis of this crisis. In this instance, the authorities' indifference to the longstanding lack of clean water is treated as a form of violence. Although this indifference is not malicious, it serves to intensify residents' own powerlessness to protect their families from disease and death. Residents' fear over speaking out over the injustice causes them to internalize their frustration, which leads to a feeling of general powerlessness. This powerlessness in the face of death is amplified, until it becomes a permanent fixture of the culture.
